A hike through the old growth of Olympic National Park with former millworker Jim Podlesny reveals more than one way to look at a giant Douglas-fir, and also at the life of a one-time logging community.
Environmental Protection and Growth Management in the West – 1999
Everyone from planners to community activists and lawyers is welcome at a continuing education program workshop, Environmental Protection and Growth Management in the West – 1999. The Oct. 29-30 gathering will focus on what works to protect open spaces and what doesn’t. To register, write to the Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute at the University…
Endangered boreal toads
Colorado hikers will find “WANTED” posters at trailheads this fall. The state Division of Wildlife, which posted the signs, is not looking for fugitives, but endangered boreal toads. The toads are often confused with chorus frogs or Woodhouse toads and biologists are trying to track legitimate sightings. They hope hikers will help with pictures, postcards,…
The Wayward West
Meridian, Idaho, will host a high-visibility merger Oct. 2, when Rep. Helen Chenoweth, 61, weds Wayne Hage, 62. Chenoweth is famous for fighting federal protection of endangered species and wilderness (HCN, 9/28/98). Her betrothed, a rancher from Tonopah, Nev., has battled the Forest Service in court for almost a decade over grazing (HCN, 10/30/95). Invitations…
Crow tribe lays claim to elk
The Crow Tribe has launched a plan to capture 550 wild elk on its reservation in the Bighorn Mountains of Montana. It’s the beginning of the tribe’s foray into game farming, but it is also sure to mark the beginning of a bitter battle over publicly owned wildlife. “It is a spooky proposal, that’s for…
Downwinders speak up and pay up
More than 500 residents of Jackson Hole, Wyo., packed a meeting hall in late August to fight a nuclear-waste incinerator planned for eastern Idaho. The crowd rallied to the evangelical fervor of Gerry Spence, the flamboyant lawyer who has built a national career on high-profile cases. By the end of the evening, everyone from movie…
A rare vote on water
For decades, water conservancy districts across the West have been shielded from the ballot box. Almost always, judges or governors appoint the board members, who have the power to levy taxes. This summer, for only the second time in 62 years, voters in Colorado had the chance to elect board members to a water district.…
Glen Canyon unplugged
Michael Collier, a river-runner, geologist, pilot and photographer who sometimes masquerades as a physician, has been using his “bushy sort of airplane” to take river pictures from the air since 1975. Slides from Collier’s recent book Water, Earth and Sky: the Colorado River Basin, co-authored with Dave Wegner of the Glen Canyon Institute, will be…
Is help from a federal agency a “charade’?
Is the federal Office of Surface Mining (OSM) a pawn of the mining industry? The Denver-based Citizens Coal Council says “yes’ and points to documents it obtained by filing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The Citizens Coal Council, a federation of 48 citizens’ groups in 21 states, sued the OSM to release its files.…
Blurring the landscape
In southern Idaho’s irrigated landscape, the boundaries between what’s natural and what’s not appear to be definitive: Canals and huge water sprayers on central pivots draw stark lines between fields of green produce and sagebrush desert. But historian Mark Fiege says in Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West, that…
Up in the air
Currently offering: rent-free co-op housing in upper and middle canopy condos, 150-230 ft. above reality, with suspended sidewalks winding between 500/600/700-year-old Doug fir and hemlock trees. * from a poster by Red Cloud Thunder, a group protesting the Clark Timber Sale near Eugene, Ore. It’s amazing what gets done in treetops these days. Julia Butterfly,…
A gem of a park
Great Basin National Park is a modest gem. Set in Nevada, within a stone’s throw of Utah, deep in the stillness of the Great Basin, the park was formed out of other public land in 1986. Like many parks, it was the child of compromise: Cattle were permitted to continue to graze the alpine meadows…
The Millworker and the Forest
Notes on natural history, human industry and the deepest wilds of the Northwest
Dear Friends
Here come the hunters Though the health department made our meat-locker neighbor shroud its backdoor hoist with a giant tarp, staff can’t help noticing all the carcasses swinging by. Elk and deer, so far, we can report, but no black bear. All have been killed by the hunting elite that likes to make things tough…
Battered borderlands
The Border Patrol seeks a conservation ethic
The Cowboy State’s next boom
GILLETTE, Wyo. – Will Wyoming’s arid Powder River Basin be home to cranberry bogs and alligator farms? Most people aren’t taking such suggestions too seriously yet. But thanks to a boom in coal-bed methane development, the basin will soon have more water than anyone knows what to do with. “The fact is, we’re going to…
An Arizona mayor condemns the New West’s thirst for servants
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to another article,”Battered borderlands.” Ray Borane, mayor of Douglas, Ariz., from a letter to the Aspen Daily News, dated July 8, 1999: “The U.S. Border Patrol has apprehended and expelled from our area more than 200,000 illegal aliens since the beginning…
Heard around the West
Is there a “Stupid Motorist Act” in Arizona? You bet, says Elliot Freireich of the West Valley View in Litchfield Park. After summer monsoons hit, dry washes suddenly fill with water and cascade onto roads, he reports. Yet some drivers with more bravado than brains try to splash through. “Sometimes they make it. Sometimes they…
Disease is wasting the West’s wild herds
Nobody knows where the disease came from, or if it has existed forever, confined to the lodgepole forests, shortgrass prairies and alfalfa fields of north-central Colorado and southeast Wyoming. It is not known how it passes among its victims. What is certain is that the whitetails, mule deer and elk that contract it inevitably die…
The Red Desert: Wyoming’s endangered country
RED DESERT, Wyo. – Fossils of tree limbs were all around, most the size of my fingers, a few the size of horse troughs. Prehistoric bits of turtle shell, horse bones and arrowhead chippings also lay scattered, testimony to the diverse inhabitants who once frequented this ocean-turned-desert. I suddenly looked up. Our group had flushed…
Do you want more wilderness? Good luck
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Poor W. Howard Gray didn’t know what hit him. Just a few years before, in the early 1960s, the head of the American Mining Congress seemed justified in confidently predicting oblivion for this absurd proposal to set aside millions of acres of land for … well, for doing nothing with it. All…
A Lewis and Clark revival hits the Northwest
While tracing the steps of Lewis and Clark, Judy Anderson has stopped off at two dozen places where the explorers walked nearly 200 years ago. Among these, Pompey’s Pillar, a lonely landmark on the plains of southeastern Montana, remains fixed in her memory. There, immortalized behind Plexiglas, she saw William Clark’s signature carved into soft…